Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Spinning space station design
Is it cold in here?:
One constraint people are missing is that you don't want the solar panels to be in the station's shadow ever for a little while.
Kugai:
Hmmmm.
The Centralised Bathing Room makes sense. It would cut down on what was required for water reclamation and storage
Hell, even B5, as big as it was, limited the use of water for bathing. Only Ambassadorial, Officers and Guest Quarters had Wet Showers, everybody else had Vibe Showers or used Centralised Bathing Facilities, such as in the 'Fury Pilots Ready-rooms.
jwhouk:
I want to point out, as I did to IICIH, that this was all a guess on my part.
What I'm assuming is that the station is spinning around somewhat like a top as it orbits the earth. The solar panel remains facing the sun as it orbits the earth, just like (I'm assuming) Skylab, the ISS and Mir did with their panels.
Skewbrow:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 16 Feb 2012, 13:28 ---One constraint people are missing is that you don't want the solar panels to be in the station's shadow ever for a little while.
--- End quote ---
Can't you solve that problem by attaching the solar panels to the spokes of the wheel, and have them rotate (very slowly) around the spokes? I don't see a solution that does not involve periodically moving solar panels from one side of the station to the other. That may be just my personal limitation, though.
Edit: Well, a semi-obvious alternative is to make the axis of rotation perpendicular to the plane of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Then the solar panels sitting a few hundred feet above the plane of the doughnut will always see the Sun. You do need a full circle of panels in that case, because otherwise the rotation of the station will make a panel face away from the Sun once per minute (again assuming that the station rotates 1RPM).
Rephrasing my main theme: Basically artificial gravity turns the spinning space station into a gigantic gyroscope. When you have a gyroscope inside a fighter plane manouvering a full 360 degree loop, the axis of the gyroscope is always maintaining its orientation relative to the distant stars, and it cannot stay aligned with, for example, the pilot's spine. That is sort of the whole point of having the gyroscope.
Akima:
--- Quote from: Skewbrow on 16 Feb 2012, 21:23 ---Can't you solve that problem by attaching the solar panels to the spokes of the wheel, and have them rotate (very slowly) around the spokes? I don't see a solution that does not involve periodically moving solar panels from one side of the station to the other. That may be just my personal limitation, though.
Edit: Well, a semi-obvious alternative is to make the axis of rotation perpendicular to the plane of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Then the solar panels sitting a few hundred feet above the plane of the doughnut will always see the Sun. You do need a full circle of panels in that case, because otherwise the rotation of the station will make a panel face away from the Sun once per minute (again assuming that the station rotates 1RPM).
--- End quote ---
This sort of thing is why space-habitat proposals often involve mirrors, although Jeph's plainly does not. The Stanford Torus study, for example, proposed an angled, non-rotating mirror to reflect sunlight onto solar arrays mounted between the "spokes" of the "wheel", and I think that would work on similar, if less grandiose, space-stations. In Earth orbit, there's still the problem of passing through Earth's shadow, so you'd need energy storage facilities, or auxiliary nuclear generators, or both.
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